William Duffin was reading a great deal of psychology, prefatory to attempting a major biography, and he had devoted most of his fall seminar to a discussion of psychoanalytic biography and its possibilities. Jim dutifully brought home the works of the various psychologists Duffin recommended, and Patsy, who still could not resist snooping in whatever he was reading, read sections of books by Ernest Jones, Erik Erikson, Norman O. Brown, Philip Rieff, and R. D. Laing. At first she felt intensely interested and cheered and rather hopeful. She skipped from book to book, always with the sense that the next chapter or the next page might reveal to her why she was in trouble and tell her what she might do to get out. Everything seemed somehow applicable, and yet, as it turned out, nothing she came to was precisely applicable, or even helpful. She still fought with Jim, yearned to be out of trouble, slept with Hank; she was even beginning to fight with him too. Before long the psychology began to depress her. The terminology that had been briefly fascinating began to seem turgid, and the insights that for a time had seemed dramatic began to seem monotonous and depressing. At the end of two weeks she went back to magazines and fiction. Every time she opened one of the psychologists she ended up feeling more hopeless than she had been feeling. The books were not going to help.
They did increase her vocabulary, though, and made her more formidable in argument.
“I’m getting rid of you any day now,” she told Hank one morning. “You’re nothing but an ego support. I’ll find someone else to support my feeble ego.” For no good reason she had gone from one bed directly to another and she was disgusted with herself.
“I love you,” he said. “What’s wrong with me? You’re always criticizing me now.” It was true, and it puzzled him.
“In the main you’re rather uninteresting,” she said, yawning.
“In the main?”
“Sure. Isn’t that a good graduate school phrase? In the main you’re kind of dull.” And she smiled at him cheerfully, in a way that bothered him; he couldn’t tell if she really thought he was dull or not.
“Why do you sleep with me then?” he asked, offended.
“Why not?” she said, twisting a lock of hair around her finger. “Ladies are sometimes attracted to dullards, I guess. My wretched body has an affinity for you. So what? I’ll conquer it yet.”
“You talk too much,” Hank said, turning on his stomach.
“So I’ve been told,” she said.
That night at home she had a fit, and for very little reason. She had only seen Hank for an hour that morning, and short visits left her with an edge. When she took the edge home and it encountered some tension there, such grip as she had on herself was destroyed and anything might happen.
In this case the fit was over books. Rice had secured, for one year, a famous visiting professor, an old crony of Duffin’s whose speciality was the nineteenth-century novel. Jim and most of the other graduate students had been herded into his seminar, and Jim soon had another hero to worship. He began buying books again, this time nineteenth-century novels. When Patsy got home from Hank’s a large box had arrived from a bookseller in Scotland and the very sight of it made her fume. All their bookshelves were full, there was absolutely no room for more books until they moved, if they moved, and it annoyed her that he had ordered more. She had read more of the books than he had, anyway, and the new box was a very large one.
The contents, it turned out, were forty-four volumes, twenty-six of George Eliot and eighteen of George Meredith. Jim unpacked them after supper, delightedly, while she was putting Davey to bed. Davey liked to lie on his back and contemplate the ceiling when put to bed, and Patsy would often stand by the baby bed awhile, tickling his stomach or letting him clutch her fingers. He had developed a vocabulary of meaningless sounds, which she interpreted and answered as she chose. It was a pleasant time. When Davey got sleepy he generally rolled abruptly on his stomach and was gone as quickly, it seemed to her, as Jim went when he was ready for sleep. Such little resemblances, already noticeable, touched her and disquieted her. It was fine that he should have his father’s charm, but not all of his father’s habits, and she had the feeling that there might be very little she could do about it.
When she turned from Davey, Jim was sitting on the couch writing his name in pencil in each of the books. She came over and sat down on the couch and picked up a volume of George Meredith, frowning.
“Why do you write your name in every volume?” she asked. “Why not just in the first volume?”
“Oh, habit,” he said. “Suppose someone borrowed Felix Holt the Radical and didn’t get around to reading it for a year. They might forget whose it was.”
“Personally I’d be just as glad if someone carried off Felix Holt the Radical and kept it forever,” she said.
“You’re a woman. You have no sense of the comprehensive.”
“I don’t like remarks prefaced by ‘You’re a woman.’ My sex has nothing to do with it and I don’t see where comprehensiveness comes in.”
“If you’re going to have an author you might as well have him complete,” Jim said.
“I think that’s dull. It makes more sense just to have the books you like. I’m never going to want to read Felix Holt the Radical and neither are you.”
“How do you know? Maybe I’ll have to do a paper on it someday.”
“Great. Where do we put them while we’re waiting for you to get assigned one of them?”
“I guess they can go in a closet until we move,” he said. “Or else I’ll box some of the paperbacks and put them in a closet.
“No fair,” Patsy said, picking up another volume of George Meredith. “I read the paperbacks. Who is this man? I never heard of him.”
“Sure you have. George Meredith.”
But Patsy had never heard of George Meredith, that she could remember, and was irked to be made to feel that she ought to have. “I’m not a graduate student,” she said. “I don’t know everything. What did he write that’s good?”
“You’ve heard of him,” Jim insisted. He was rather pleased that she hadn’t—she had few enough glaring gaps. “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Egoist”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I think there was something by him in My Book House. Did he write children’s books?”
“I’m not too big on him but the set was so cheap I couldn’t resist.”
“I don’t understand you,” she said. “Why did you have to buy these now? There must be a set of George Eliot closer than Scotland that you could get if you needed to write on her. Or you could even use a library book for a change.”
“Why not buy them? They were cheap.”
“That’s no reason to buy something. It’s a terrible reason to buy a book. I’d be willing to bet you won’t read ten pages of any one of these books in the next five years.”
“Bet me enough and I’ll read ten pages right now. If you’d hurry and go look at the Duffin house maybe we could move in January and then we’d have plenty of book space.”
“Oh, hell,” she said. “That’s a fine goddamn reason to buy a house. If you think I’m going to buy that house and sit and watch you turn into William Duffin you’re crazy.”
“What do you want a house for, then?” he asked. “It was your idea.”
“I want a house big enough that I can get away from you without going outdoors,” she said hotly. The sight of the stacks of books plus his patient quiet assurance that sooner or later she would decide what they should do angered her uncontrollably. For a moment all she wanted was revenge. She reached out a foot and kicked over a stack of George Meredith. Jim looked up. He was surprised to see how angry she was.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She got up as if to leave the room, but instead kicked the box the books had come in. “I want a house so maybe I can be happy,” she said, ashamed of herself for kicking the books.
“You wouldn’t be happy in Buckingham Palace,” he said. “Don’t be so goddamn childish. You d
on’t know that I won’t read these. I may read every one of them.
“You’re too spoiled to be happy,” he added, as if in afterthought. “If that’s why you want a house, let’s forget it. You’d just be disappointed once we moved in.”
“Go to hell,” she said. “You’re no one to call me spoiled. I took care of your son all summer while you played games with cameras and older women and went to rodeos and all that. You don’t care whether your son has a room of his own or not. It never occurs to you what other people might need.”
“Oh, it occurs to me. You’ve pointed out to me what you think you need every second day since we’ve been married.”
“A lot of goddamn good it’s done me,” she said. “Nothing’s changed yet.”
“Yes it has, you’re twice as profane,” he said. “You didn’t use to yell curses, just complaints. If I had a dollar for every time you’ve complained we could make a down payment on a house.”
“I wouldn’t live in that house if they gave it to us,” she said. “If you don’t like my language you can leave. This place is big enough for Davey and me.”
She began to cry and Jim tried to apologize, but every time he said anything to her she yelled at him and it woke Davey up and he cried too and was very agitated. She was a long time calming him. As she was standing by the baby bed stroking Davey’s back the anger went out of her and she felt terribly in the wrong and ashamed of herself.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said when Davey was asleep again. Jim was on the bed, resting his hip and looking gloomy. “I don’t know why I attacked you.”
“It’s all right. I guess it was unnecessary, buying those books.”
“No, buy all the books you want to. Why not? One of us will read them someday. But we have to have a house, see? So Davey can get away from us when I pick a fight with you.”
“I agree. The Duffins are certainly eager to sell.”
He tried to rub her back, to soothe her, but she didn’t want any back rubbing. “Do you think I ought to see a psychiatrist?” she asked.
“Why?” He was surprised.
“Because we keep having fights.”
“I’m sure everybody has fights.”
“But we don’t have anything else any more.”
Jim turned off the light and tried to pull her close to him, to comfort her. She didn’t resist, but as soon as he was asleep she began to edge away from him. Since his return she had not liked to sleep close to him. Every night she edged away and awoke in the morning to find herself on the very edge of the bed. She always awoke before he did and got up while he was asleep, so he didn’t notice. He had not noticed anything; only that her rages were more violent. Otherwise he treated her as if she were the Patsy she had been before the summer. It was partly a relief, partly a disappointment. He didn’t know who she was, and while that was good, it was also bad. She didn’t like feeling herself a stranger to her own husband.
The next morning Jim reminded her that he had asked Hank to dinner that evening. It was an occasion he insisted on and she dreaded it. For three weeks she had postponed it with one excuse after another, but there seemed no way to postpone it any longer. Yet the thought of it made her sick with tension. That afternoon, while Jim was in his nineteenth-century novel seminar, she went to Hank’s and was sick at her stomach from the tension. She lay on his couch fully dressed and white and cold at the contemplation of the evening and the mess her life was in.
Hank was sulky. He had hoped to make love. He was reading The End of the Road. The sight of the book made Patsy the more depressed. For some reason she connected the beginning of the end of her romance—her romance, as opposed to her affair—with her own reading of it, which had occurred about a month before. The book had been lying around Hank’s apartment for months before she grabbed it one day while hastening to the john. She read it straight through, growing more and more depressed with each turned page. She hated it but it fascinated her. She didn’t like anyone in it, neither Jacob Horner nor either of the Morgans, and she decided privately that the reason the book fascinated her was because it was a time in her life when she really didn’t like anyone, herself included. Only Davey was exempt from her blanket dislike. Emma was okay, but Emma was a pillar of virtue against which she could not comfortably lean. Jim and Hank and herself were as wretched a threesome as the one in Barth, it seemed to her.
Somehow the book made clear to her something that she didn’t want to know: that she was not in love with Hank. For a month or two she had had the strong if sporadic illusion that she was. She had been illusioning herself a grand passion, and at first, when everything was new, the illusion worked. Feeling blurred her vision for a while and life was beautiful; then, despite herself, her vision began to clear and she could not help seeing the man she was involved with. And the man she was involved with was not so remarkable as she had first supposed him to be. What it boiled down to, she had come to fear, was that he just happened to be a good lay, or the kind of lay she just happened to need at that time. Otherwise, he was really no better than Jim—not as smart, actually, and no stronger, if as strong. He had more animal stubbornness, but it was of a very selfish kind. For a while he kept her dazed with sex, and she was glad; she didn’t want to be objective about him. But then it ceased to daze her in quite the same way; she began to grow objective even before she left the bed.
At times she was angry with Nature herself for making her so physically vulnerable to someone who was going to turn out to be temporary, after all. She knew that even the best relationships were supposed to have gaps, but except for sex theirs was practically all gap. For one thing, Hank was too soft. The longer she knew him the more convinced she was that the only part of him that was ever hard was his penis. Otherwise he was quite yielding. He really didn’t want her to hang around long, once they had made love, because if she did they invariably got in an argument and Patsy invariably won. There was almost no point he wouldn’t yield if she pressed him hard enough. He was capable of temper, but not capable of really standing up against her onslaughts. She told him not to let her have her way, but he did, anyway, to her disgust.
When disappointment first began to dawn she tried to hide it from herself. She tried very hard to be in love. Sex was her way of trying, and it seemed, for a time, that it might be a sufficient way. She only realized it wasn’t going to be when it occurred to her one day that she wouldn’t want to marry him; there were too many things she didn’t like about him. She could not really visualize them outside his apartment. The thought that, after all, they were only temporary frightened her, and to escape from it she turned back to sex with a kind of voracity that amazed her. For a time she had only two modes, the carnal and the maternal. At home, in the late afternoon, she would bathe Davey and powder him and then sit with him in her lap, smelling his neck or behind his ears, thinking how very different a baby smelled from a man. She pressed her face against Davey’s neck and listened to him gurgle, or let him pull her hair, still calmed and subdued from the things she had done in the afternoon, only an hour or two earlier, when her face had been pressed against Hank’s neck, in a room where there were quite different smells.
Only Jim, slowly recovering, was left out of it all. He was nice; she was nice to him, but never came close enough to him to notice that he had a smell. It saddened her. She wept for him and for them sometimes when she noticed him looking lonely, or when it occurred to her how much he must need; but he could do nothing about her and she could do nothing about herself.
And he seemed to suspect nothing at all about Hank, which was the reason she had not been able to get out of the awkward dinner. “Couldn’t you pretend to be sick?” she asked, looking over at Hank, who was still reading.
“No,” he said. “I did that once. I could bring Kenny. He loves your dinners. Or would you rather I brought a date.”
“Shut up,” she said. “Would you get me a Coke?”
He did, and she sipped it unhappily. “How did it
get this way?” she asked. “It was wonderful for a month or two, and now it’s a hopeless mess.”
“Maybe I should go away again,” he said without looking at her.
Patsy gave him a dark look. “Why?” she said.
“To end the mess.”
“Sure,” she said. “Go on, desert me. It’s exactly what I deserve. When are you thinking of going? Shall I pack you a lunch?”
“I wasn’t thinking of going. I just said it.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I remember now. Your remarks originate in the larynx, not the brain.” She belched and felt a little better.
He looked hurt, and she began to feel sorry for him. “Don’t leave,” she said later. The fact that she didn’t really love him didn’t change much. She was still involved with him, still wanted him to come sit by her. “There’s no reason a mess can’t go on forever,” she said when he came and sat by her.
“It will drive you crazy.”
“So what,” she said. “Anything for novelty. You’ve never asked me to leave him and marry you, you know.”
“I know you too well,” Hank said.
“I don’t like being known that well,” she said and was silent. She lay blankly for fifteen minutes; she had ceased to believe in anything—love, decency, peace, anything. A fog of depression covered her; somehow Hank sneaked into it and aroused her. The fog dispersed, but there were problems even in the sunlight. She had grown more uninhibited—there was no point in being an inhibited adulteress, that she could see—and wanted to do something new, but Hank wouldn’t let her. He was prudish about himself; he liked to do it his own simple way. Several times, trying to explore her new feelings, she had been rebuffed. It hurt her; she couldn’t understand it or make him talk about it, but she kept hoping. It hurt again that he rebuffed her, but she was too glad to be out of the fog to want to fight about it.